NASA finds new life. on earth.

so I guess aliens that bleed acid really isn't so far fetched...


article below taken from http://gizmodo.com/5704158/


"NASA has discovered a new life form—called GFAJ-1—that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. It's capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything. Updated.

NASA is saying that this is "life as we do not know it". The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

In a surprising discovery, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks.

NASA Finds New Life (Updated)The new life forms up close, at five micrometers.

According to Wolfe Simon, they knew that "some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new—building parts of itself out of arsenic." The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth. Like NASA's Ed Weiler says: "The definition of life has just expanded."

NASA Finds New Life (Updated) Here's the organism and a computer simulation on how it substitutes phosphorous for arsenic in its DNA

Talking at the NASA conference, Wolfe Simon said that the important thing here is that this breaks our ideas on how life can be created and grow, pointing out that scientists will now be looking for new types of organisms and metabolism that not only uses arsenic, but other elements as well. She says that she's working on a few possibilities herself.

NASA's geobiologist Pamela Conrad thinks that the discovery is huge and "phenomenal," comparing it to the Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise crew finds Horta, a silicon-based alien life form that can't be detected with tricorders because it wasn't carbon-based. It's like saying that we may be looking for new life in the wrong places with the wrong methods. Indeed, NASA tweeted that this discovery "will change how we search for life elsewhere in the Universe."

NASA Finds New Life (Updated)Even closer, showing their internal structure.

I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life."


here's the link to the full NASA website article : http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

 

That's amazing!

This goes a long way on proving that you don't need an earth-like planet to sustain life. Not only does it rearrange what life requires but also what environments it can thrive in. Since the most hostile temperature that an organism can survive in is thought to be 150C(only one organism is found as high as 121C) due to it being the top end of energy and biomolecules before they denature. Maybe with this change in the chemical make up of it all they can survive at a higher temperature.

 

Quite awesome if I may say so myself. -winks through monocle-

 

Lets go hunt us some aliens!

This is really cool stuff.

 

Isn't that why they funded her studies? Because they didn't think the universe conformed to us?

 

But clearly humans are perfect.

 

I saw this article last night, stating it was "announced" today, and I forgot about it until I remembered at work.

I loved this quote in this article, from NASA's site:
Link:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

Quote:
"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."

 

The way that article is worded is a little misleading, it's not that it's a new form of life, but it is life that has adapted to using arsenic instead of phosphorous in its components. Arsenic generally doesn't work for this because it screws up the operation of some enzymes. There is also some debate whether or not these new parts are actually functional or not. They still have to prove that the arsenic is actually a replacement for the phosphate in the DNA and the other biomolecules. Arsenate also has way weaker bonds in water, and I haven't seen anything yet that shows why it isn't busting apart.

Still though, yeah, it's cool

 

Very awesome find! About a 3 months ago at the start of my molecular biology class the teacher posed the question "if we were looking for life on other planets what do we look for". The number of narrow minded fools that said look for "us" was astounding. The professor actually called one of the kids stupid. I enjoyed it immensely.

That animation they show is quite misleading. I was under the impression I was going to see a series of reactions that would end with the replacement of P by As but instead they just popped out one and substituted the other lol

I am curious to know if the bacteria are found like that in the wild or not. I got the impression they only discovered this once they substituted arsenate for phosphate. I would like to see the machinery and enzymes responsible for all of this. I would really like to get my hands on the research paper. I also wonder if this would function outside of a plasmid and if there are any implications in transcription/translation of the genes and activity of proteins once synthesized. Easiest way to look for function is maybe look at the membrane proteins and look for ones that have arsenate substituted. I'm currently trying to get access to the research paper.

**Edit: Well that was easy enough to get the paper. Just had to register Sleezy way to get membership though

 

Im sure there is some life form out there that breaths in nitrogen, carbon dioxide,methane and hydrogen and farts out oxygen.

 

Who knows, give that little bugger a couple of millions years, it may evolve into Will Smith. Errr, I mean something else :|

 

Plants?

 

Actually my microbial ecology teacher knows the three doctors who did the research and(off topic) he says he was surpised that she got her name on it and not the main doctor who was actually researching it. But he said that its kind of a misleading paper because the organism still grows on phosphorus but can use arsenic. The whole experiment was actually conducted by only giving the organisms arsenic as its major product so it was in essence forced to use it. In nature he said they use phosphorus before arsenic.

This is also why people are wondering why a lake organism is able to survive solely on arsenic because it is so soluble in water. It's because it doesn't actually use only arsenic in its home environment.

Still despite that fact its still a major breakthrough because it does show that organisms can adapt, survive, and thrive in a completely different environment than expected before.